From TV programs such as Wheel of Fortune to daily point spreads in newspaper sports pages, the gambling spirit is everywhere in American life. Casinos have spread beyond tawdry, out-of-the-way locations such as Las Vegas to Indian reservations and cities across the country. Riverboats, with their poker machines and blackjack tables, ply the nation's great rivers again, as their predecessors did over a century ago. The gambling and casino boom has breached even the citadel of middle-class respectability in the form of hotels such as Las Vegas' Circus Circus and Treasure Island, featuring "family" entertainment within yards of slot machines. Variously blamed on de-industrialization, a decline in the American work ethic, and a lapse in moral values, gambling's something-for-nothing mentality has become an important part of the American consciousness. Long a refined diversion for the wealthy and a desperate last chance for the poor, it is perhaps only technology and style that separates twentieth century gambling from its primeval counterparts.
Gambling, the betting or staking of something of value, is as old as humankind itself. Betting on horses began as soon as the animals were domesticated, and gambling's ties to sports date back as far as 1450 B.C.E., when Egyptians competed against each other in jumping, wrestling, and ball game competitions, centuries before the first Greek Olympics. As many as 250,000 spectators watched, and gambled on, chariot races in Rome's Circus Maximus. Gospel writers Matthew and Mark report that Roman guards gambled for Jesus' garments following his crucifixion, "casting lots upon them, what every man should take." Towns challenged towns in medieval archery matches, and gambling was an ever present accompaniment as sports competitions became organized in Europe during the Renaissance and early Modern periods.
In the New World, special days were set aside by the Northwest Coast Indians for "mook-te-lo," or wagering on games. The Iroquois played a betting game called "hubbub" with dice made from peach stones. Participants hit themselves on the chest and thighs, crying "hub hub hub" so loudly that they could be heard a quarter-of-a-mile away according to a contemporary report. The first deck of cards to be manufactured in the Western hemisphere was made by Columbus' crew in 1492. According to the story, the sailors threw their European cards overboard because they believed gambling was bringing them ill fortune during their long voyage. Once ashore in the New World, they regretted their impulsive behavior and made substitute decks from the large leaves of the copas tree. Lotteries, begun in England in 1566, were approved for the new Jamestown settlement in Virginia by King James I in 1612. Proceeds were used to sustain the struggling colony until the king withdrew his permission in 1621.
The Puritans first objected to popular recreations like gambling during the seventeenth century because they violated Sabbatarian principles. In the Puritan's distinctive mixture of capitalism and Calvinism, gambling was a double sin, a violation of the Lord's day of rest and an ungodly diversion from work the other six days of the week. Puritans had little success convincing Europeans to stop betting but they established strict statutes against gambling and other worldly distractions in their early American settlements beginning in 1638. Lotteries were unnecessary appeals to providence, according to Puritan minister Increase Mather, who believed that "God determines the cast of the dice or the shuffle of the cards, and we are not to implicate His providence in frivolity." The Puritans' holy opposition to gambling faded in the New England colonies during the eighteenth century, and they had never had much influence on mid-Atlantic and southern colonists, but the Puritan association of gaming and wagering with alcoholism, idleness, and ungodliness became a recurrent theme in numerous anti-gambling crusades during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Lotteries were a common recourse for eighteenth-century American colonists in search of funds for wars, schools, charities, or other purposes. George Washington himself bought and sold lottery tickets, and Benjamin Franklin spoke in favor of a lottery to finance the purchase of a cannon battery for Philadelphia in 1748. In 1758, once-Puritan Massachusetts authorized a lottery to fund an expedition against Canada during the French and Indian Wars. Gambling was still considered a vice, however, and during the first days of the American Revolution, various colonial "committees of safety" opposed gambling as a means of galvanizing public morality. General Washington, a frequent gambler at cards, forbade gambling among his soldiers when it distracted them from their military duties, even during the grueling winter at Valley Forge. However, the Continental Congress sponsored a national lottery in 1777, promoting it as a contribution "to the great and glorious American cause," only to be disappointed by the proceeds because the loosely-knit colonists failed to gamble as freely as their more sophisticated English counterparts.
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On the rough-and-tumble borders of the new country, however, gambling was a primary diversion. Thoroughbred horse racing, cockfights, card games, billiards, and fighting over the outcome of such contests were favorite past times of eighteenth-century frontier inhabitants, and gambling, alcoholism, prostitution, and related social vices continued to be associated with the American frontier as it spread westward throughout the nineteenth century. The 1803 Louisiana Purchase opened the western Ohio and Mississippi, and as commerce developed on the waterways, so did gambling. New Orleans evolved as America's first gambling city as flatboat men, farmers, and plantation owners played a French card game named "poque." With a few modifications, draw "poker" became the quintessential American card game. Gambling was outlawed in the rest of the huge Louisiana territory in 1811 in the wake of a popular anti-gambling tract written by Mason Locke Weems (better known for authorship of the myth about George Washington chopping down the cherry tree), but gambling remained a critical component of New Orleans' economy and politics for another century.
The first American gambling casino was opened in New Orleans around 1822. Owner John Davis provided gourmet food, liquor, roulette wheels, faro tables, poker, and other games, made certain that prostitutes were never far away, and kept his club house open twenty-four hours a day. Dozens of imitators soon made gaming, drink, and women of easy virtue the primary attractions of New Orleans. The city's status as an international port and its thriving gambling industry created a new profession, the card "sharper." Professional gamblers and cheats gathered in a waterfront area known as "the swamp," an area even the police were afraid to frequent, and any gambler lucky enough to win stood a good chance of losing his earnings to thieves outside of the gambling rooms and saloons. The slot machine, invented by Charles Fey in San Francisco in 1895, first became popular with New Orleans gamblers. Reform movements struggled to limit gambling and prostitution to a red light district until military restrictions put the halls and brothels out of business during World War I.
The nineteenth-century relationship between gambling and western expansion was epitomized by the early West's favorite son, President Andrew Jackson. Jackson was not the first president to gamble openly, but he bet with such an intensity that he created an image that came to stereotype all Westerners. He bet on cards, lotteries, and cockfights, but he preferred horse racing, a sport suited to his western Tennessee roots. Jackson hated losing, and his advice to a nephew summarized not only his personality but the mood of entire nation during his presidential term: "You must risk to win." New frontier settlements risked everything for success, and those that prospered almost always embraced gambling. Chicago became a city in 1837, the same year it ostensibly outlawed gambling, but gaming "hells" continued to flourish along with drunkenness and prostitution. By 1849, there were as many gambling establishments in Chicago per capita as New York City and more than 1,000 women were said to be employed as prostitutes in 1856. The New England-bred Mayor "Long" John Wentworth ordered the destruction of gambling houses along Chicago's notorious Sands riverfront district in 1857, but the denizens simply moved to more law-abiding sections of the city where open gambling continued until 1904 when Mayor Carter Harrison closed all of the city's horse-racing tracks.
Gambling thrived in the South as well. Horse racing was the most popular sport for betting, and formal racing sessions were organized by the upper class in Williamsburg, Fredericksburg, Annapolis, and Alexandria well before the Revolutionary War. Slaves rode Southern race horses until replaced by white riders after the Civil War, inspiring the black jockey lawn ornaments that persisted into the twentieth century. The development of the telegraph, especially a modification permitting the transmission of more than one message at a time, allowed betting from a distance and made betting on the races a major business in the South. The first sports pages in American newspapers were reports on horse racing until the rise of professional baseball after the Civil War. Baseball, too, attracted gamblers. The Chicago "Black Sox" scandal of 1919, which saw the best team in baseball lose a World Series on purpose, was predated by the Louisville Greys, who threw enough games to go from a comfortable first place in the National League standings to late season also-rans in 1877.
Steamboats and riverfront gambling houses along the lower Mississippi attracted swarms of professional gamblers. A host of companies specialized in manufacturing and selling card cheating devices. One riverboat gambler named George Devol was so proud of his ability to slip a stacked deck into a game that he once used four of them in one poker hand, dealing four aces to each of his four opponents. Devol bragged of his exploits in his 1887 memoir, Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi. Children looked upon such professional gamblers as heroic figures. "To me as a boy, the gambler was an object of awed admiration," sportswriter Hugh Fullerton recalled of his Southern boyhood in the 1870s. But anxious townsfolk viewed the presence of such confidence men as a vestige of an unruly frontier past. Five "sharps" were lynched by vigilantes in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1835, less for religious reasons than to preserve civic respectability, and other river cities applied similar, if less stringent preventatives. Still, the riverboat gambler came to symbolize freedom in dime novels and other popular literature, even though most died poor.
California established a reputation for professional gambling as well. In the wake of the state's 1848 gold rush, European traveler Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Gerstacker observed that "gambling houses are now to California what slave-holding is to the United States." Professional gamblers became so wealthy and influential that they managed to become controlling political forces in the state for short periods of time. In San Francisco, gamblers played all day and all night at games that were refined into a high-volume industry. Rather than cheating and deceit, the city's gambling saloons relied on percentages and odds for their profits, foreshadowing the Las Vegas casinos a century later. Miners did not seem to mind. San Francisco gambling mirrored the entire gold rush mentality that "the fun would be worth a fortune almost," as one contemporary wrote. Professional gamblers were an implicit, if not sanctioned, part of the casino scene until journalist and businessman James King launched such a vigorous crusade against them that he was murdered in 1856. In revenge, his alleged killer and a professional dealer named Charles Cora were lynched by vigilantes. Nonetheless, gaming continued in San Francisco, on a less ostentatious scale, into the 1910s.
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Gambling flourished in other Western mining camps and towns that supplied the prospectors. Virginia City, Comstock, and Deadwood became as well known for faro and gunfights over card games as they did for mineral wealth. Even cattle towns such as Dodge City, Kansas, had forty saloons and gambling houses to cater to the cowboys, buffalo hunters, and railroad workers that visited it in 1875. But prohibition was in the wind. Scandals involving lottery ticket sales, including a massive fraud in the Louisiana lottery in 1894, the rise of baseball and other spectator sports, and a revival of moral concerns against idleness, drunkenness, and debauchery led to laws against lotteries and gambling in most states by 1910. "Puritanism [was] the inflexible doctrine of Los Angeles," one historian noted. By 1908, 289 of the nation's 314 thoroughbred horse race tracks had been closed.
Horse racing was the first gambling industry to be reborn. Colonel Matt J. Winn, president of Churchill Downs, dusted off old pari-mutual machines stored in the back of the track's storehouse, banished illegal bookmakers, and made sure the state of Kentucky got a share of every bet made at his track. Pari-mutual horse wagering was legalized in other states, especially during the cash-strapped Depression years. State racing boards or commissions supervised the tracks, reducing cutthroat competition and providing an aura of respectability for a public concerned about the connection between gambling and crime. Professionals gamblers remained, epitomized by George E. Smith, better known as "Pittsburgh Phil," who made horse betting into a science. Bookmakers prospered as well, off track, aided by advances in communication such as radio. Although state lotteries were not revived until 1964, numbers games were introduced to Harlem by West Indian immigrants in the 1920s and spread to other cities. Manufactured games such as pull tabs and punch boards appeared in rural areas, as did illegal slot machines and other electronic devices. Almost 25 percent of Americans admitted gambling on church-sponsored bingo games and lotteries in a 1938 Gallop poll. New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia stated the obvious, "if bingo is unlawful in one place, it cannot be lawful in another." Politicians have tried to resolve this dilemma over the remainder of the twentieth century.
Most casinos and "gambling hells" were shut down during the early 1900s, even in obscure locations such as French Lick, Indiana, and Canton, Ohio. True to the worst fears of the Puritans, gangsters combined liquor and gambling in New York, Cleveland, Chicago, and other cities during the 1920s. Florida temporarily legalized slot machines during the depths of the Depression at about the same time that El Monte and Gardena, California, licensed poker. But it was a dusty little Nevada town located on the old Spanish Trail that reintroduced casinos and gambling to twentieth-century America.
Las Vegas was established as a Mormon mission before the Civil War. Its future was assured when the San Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt Lake railroad laid track in 1904 and three other railroads, including the Union Pacific, soon followed suit. The railroads were the town's primary employer but the providing of ice, refreshments, shelter, and other amenities became almost as important. Although gambling was banned in Nevada in 1909, Las Vegas continued to grow, reaching a population of 5,165. It remained a railroad town until divorce and gambling laws were relaxed and the federal government began the construction of Hoover Dam in 1930. The first major hotel, the 100-room Apache, opened in 1932 to augment an active red light district patronized by dam workers. So many workers and their families poured into Las Vegas that the New York Times claimed the city had "a touch of Mexico's Tijuana" in 1936. Still, Las Vegas continued to be outpaced by its primary competitor, Reno, and boasted only six casinos and sixteen saloons by 1939.
The post-World War II improvement of automobiles and highways, especially to and from Los Angeles, forever changed Las Vegas. Downtown's Fremont Street became "Glitter Gulch" and the vacant Las Vegas Boulevard was renamed the "Strip." Three casinos opened in 1946 including mobster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel's Flamingo Hotel. The Horseshoe Club began hosting the World Series of Poker in 1951. Motion pictures such as the 1952 Las Vegas Story, staring Jane Russell and Victor Mature, and the 1959 Oceans Eleven, which featured the "rat pack," Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis, Jr., Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Joey Bishop, promoted the growing sophistication of Las Vegas. The movies also helped establish gambling as an adult entertainment in a decade noted for juvenile attractions from Elvis Presley (who later became a Las Vegas star) to McDonald's. They also helped erase gambling's disreputable, low-class image. Las Vegas' gambling industry survived and even thrived under scrutiny from investigators led by Senator Estes Kefauver. His Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime leaned heavily on gambling during the early 1950s, but only a few of the committee's proposals were legislated.
The Golden Nugget was the first Las Vegas property created specifically as a hotel-casino, but every hotel provided gambling. Eventually all would feature big-name entertainment, led by pianist Liberace, who headlined the new Riviera in 1955. The city's reputation as the "last" frontier served not only as a recurring casino and hotel theme, but intensified the gambling experience. Just as thrill seekers had swarmed San Francisco's casinos a century earlier, gamblers escaped their ordinary lives in the fantasy world of Las Vegas, surrounded by flashing lights and jingling coins, visual and auditory "noise" that heightened their sensations of gambling. Sports betting became popular, influenced in part by the banning of Pete Rose from baseball in 1989. The first theme property, the Circus Circus Hotel Casino, opened in 1968, was joined by the Mirage in 1989, the Excalibur in 1990, and Treasure Island in 1993, attracting a new type of visitor, the middle-class family. The introduction of gambling in Atlantic City and other locations induced Las Vegas to reinvent itself once again, providing educational attractions such as dolphin habitats and family entertainment acts like magicians Siegfried and Roy.
St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, 2002 Gale Group.
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